To the lake this weekend. I sat like a lizard and slowed. Still excited about the pictures.

The first blog-glimpse of my life here. And it's a flattering portrait of the sitting room, the gorgeous boards, the frank, inquisitive chairs, the lingering languorous light, the leisured afternoon feel of New York. This is an untrue image. 

All sorts of wet

It started to rain just as I finished my jog. On the doorstep, I fished the keys out of my laces where I stash them to stop them rattling and staggered up to the flat to have a shower. It didn’t really start raining until Seinfeld was finishing, then, with a few minutes remaining, a red banner with white letters crept across the top of the screen, unsympathetically masking the heads of Seinfeld and his friends, to warn of flash floods in the Hudson Valley. Whenever there is a weather warning, and there are a few in New York, the Hudson Valley is the first victim, snow, rain, heat, it arrows its way to the valley. It is funny to think about a valley when you’re in a city. The city just smothers those things, where do all the little streams go? Then the Seinfeld picture froze, jiggered, brick-a-blocked into broke-n p-ix—els and went black. An apologetic little message came up, it could even have been a white lie, saying the television was searching for a satellite. It was raining now.

Drops – they were more sudden than that – were bouncing off the top of the air conditioner which Matt had jammed in the window just moments before. The air conditioner had sat, upturned, on the fire escape, since the end of last summer, September or so. The air conditioner, which we got free from somewhere, had spent the last six or seven months freezing and soaking – I remember clearly one day looking out as snow fell in wide, cold pieces, smothering the strip of black plastic bag that we half-wrapped the conditioner in. I remember thinking the air conditioner was dead, and that we had killed it. Anyway, with the sky so low and yellow and full this evening, prompting sweat to spring salty and everywhere along our foreheads, Matt decided to put the conditioner back to work. Into the window, black bag stuck up with green tape, then we plugged it in. With a little gasp, a waking sigh, the dear old thing started sucking away at the living room air again. Making the same wheezing that it made last year, the air con was back, heaving away, spitting out small pieces of dust and god knows. And now the rain was slamming down on top of it. We could tell it was happier.

I needed food and Matt wanted to get wet, so we left the flat together. I had my brolley and decided to turn up my trousers a little, a la Beckham, for some reason. For some equally, or even vaguer reason, the trouser rolled up on my right leg stayed in place, and the one on my left leg kept sliding down. It was very mysterious. A little thing I know but why so mysterious? Are my legs different shapes, is it my gait? I sometimes think that the simple little things owe us the favour of just working, of not complaining. It would free more time to think of other things, to get into the knotty ones, but I’m sure it wouldn’t work like that. So with one leg up and one leg down I walked along. Matt, on the other hand, had no protection at all, just in a shirt and shorts, he was slapped wet in an instant. The rain was everything – cats, frogs, cordes, great heaps of it washing down the gutters, showing up the humps in the road as it slid around the little hills and valleys, unthinking. Water, I noticed, never goes the wrong way. Never.

We came to some scaffolding, I ducked in and Matt, quite perversely, stepped outside its shelter and into the gutter. Above his head, gleeful, triumphant lines of water came pedalling off the corrugated iron roof above, zipped out of their slides and fell onto his head. I made some silly dabs at my trousers and Matt asked me if I wanted to ditch the umbrella and go to the park.

I got to the supermarket a couple of minutes later. Air conditioned and empty I racked up my goods and headed back out into the rain. The way back to the apartment was shorter, but there was time to look at the people. Stay long enough in the rain in the city and you’ll see the same characters – the woman at the doorway of the manicure place, hand over her mouth, chuckling with sympathy at the passersby who don’t have time to stop. In the brand new ice cream shop, which is run by a Chinese family who are always working, the assistants were all paused under the bright lights and shiny surfaces of their new shop, looking out of wide eyes: is this what happens here? And then there is the lover -- or that’s what I hope they are -- the man or woman without the umbrella, skipping along, judging misjudging, slopping suddenly, please, oh!, into a puddle that reaches their shins, slippering on, one hand flapping up against the sky deflecting, what, one drop away from their soaked hair?

Outside Down the Hatch there was a pair of smokers under umbrellas, steely. Smokers, like the Hudson Valley, have to be tough in New York. Tossed out of bars and into new flirting scenarios last Spring, they got hardened over the winter. I’m sure a few quit – couldn’t take the Stalingrad smoking world of frozen eye-lashes and dead fingers. But these two were consummate, creating their own pair of clouds in the midst of all that wet and vapour. Between the smokers a man came trotting with two unfortunate dogs, bred for bags, carpets and fondles, not for raindrops as big as their eyes. They ran, not travelling fast, the smaller one, which was brown, looked especially alarmed, hair pasted, the world was aflood, it must have looked endless.

I cooked pork chops and started typing this. The rain is easing now and bugs have snuck in to hide from the wet. One of them, delighted in the dry, keeps mistaking my computer screen for some higher realm, and throws itself into the light.

Just trying to fix the counter and add a first photo to the site....